Hello World

Now that you've installed a C++ compiler, its time to write your first C++ program. It is tradition when learning a new programming language to write a program that prints "Hello, world!" to the screen and we'll be doing the same.

Creating a Project Directory

First, you'll create a new directory to store you C++ code. It is a good idea to create a 'projects' or 'dev' directory within you home or user directory in order to store any project you might develop for this book an beyond. Open a terminal and run the following commands.

Linux, MacOS or PowerShell on Windows:

$ mkdir ~/projects
$ cd ~/projects
$ mkdir hello_world
$ cd hello_world

CMD on Windows:

> mkdir "%userprofile%\projects"
> cd "%userprofile%\projects"
> mkdir hello_world
> cd hello_world

Writing and Running a C++ Program

Within this new 'hello_world' directory we will create a new file called main.cxx. This is called a C++ source file. A C++ program is then built from one or more of these files. We use the file extension *.cxx to denote that this file contains C++ source code. If a filename contains multiple words the convention is to separate the words with an underscore eg. hello_world.cxx over helloworld.cxx. Now open the file you have just created and copy the code from Listing 1-1 into the file.

Listing 1-1: Program the prints Hello, world!

#include <iostream>

auto main() -> int {
  std::cout << "Hello, world!\n";
  return 0;
}

Save the file and return to your terminal open to the ~/projects/hello_world directory and run the following command.

On Linux or MacOS

$ g++ -std=c++20 -o hello_world main.cxx
$ ./hello_world
Hello, world!

On Windows

:: Must be done in a 'Developer Command Prompt for VS ...' 
> cl /std:c++20 /EHsc /Fe: hello_world.exe main.cxx
> .\hello_world.exe
Hello, world!

If you see "Hello, world!" printed on your terminal, congratulations, you've officially written your first C++ program!

Anatomy of a C++ Program

Let's go into some more detail on the structure of our "Hello, world!" program. The first component to cover is:

auto main() -> int {

}

This declares a function called main. The main function is known as the program's entry point, meaning main is the very first function that runs in every executable C++ program. This declaration of main takes no parameters and returns an integer (int). If there were parameters they would be declared within the parenthesis (). The body of the function is wrapped in curly braces {}.

The body of the function contains the following two lines:

  std::cout << "Hello, world!\n";
  return 0;

The second line returns a status code from main to the (OS) indicating whether the program run successfully or not. A status code of 0 indicates the program ran was successfully with any other value indicating the program failed.

The first line is where the action occurs! We start by accessing the symbol cout from the namespace std "(usually pronounced stood) using the namespace resolution operator ::. cout is a global character output stream that is linked to stdout ie. your terminal's output (you'll learn more about streams and IO in later chapters). .

We can push characters through the stream using the << operator where the left argument must be an output stream and the right argument is a series of characters, numbers or a string. In this case we are pushing the string literal "Hello, world!\n" through the stream. We use the \n character to specify a newline to be printed after our string has been written to the terminal.

You'll notice that we end the line with a semicolon ;. Semicolon's are used to indicate the end of an expression.

You'll also notice at the top of the file the following line:

#include <iostream>

This is a preprocessor instruction, more specifically it is an instruction use to import the 'iostream' library into our program. This is where the symbol for the cout output stream comes from. We include libraries by utilising the preprocessor directive #include which basically copies and pastes the contents of the file indicating within the <> symbols into our program, which in this case is the file 'iostream'. Assume this file's location (and the location of any others used in the same manner) is known to your compiler unless specified otherwise. Files imported using #include are known as headers .

Compiling and Running Are Separate Steps

You may notice that it took two separate steps in order to run our program. This is because C++ is a compiled language, meaning that our source code is transformed into something else. In the case of C++, the compiler will generate binary machine code for our target platform; which in this case is our own device before running. This means the generate (machine) code is specific to the target and you cannot transferred and run on a different computer if its architecture is different. This allows the compiler to optimise your code for the target platform but does require the additional step.

This is in contrast to interpreted languages; like Python, Ruby, JavaScript etc., which will perform the conversion while the program is running but this in turn requires another program; the interpreter, to run alongside yours, taking up extra resources but it usually means your programs are more portable as they can run on anywhere the interpreter can. These are some trade-offs made when designing or using a language.

For simple programs, directly using a C++ compiler (like g++) is fine, but as your project grows you'll want to manage all the options and make it easy to share your code. Next, we'll introduce you to the CMake tool, which will help you write manage much larger projects.